Tuesday, March 29, 2016

MMO's are peculiar in the sense
that each and every one of them represents a living-breathing world which is
born, lives its life and eventually dies when players largely or completely abandon
it. While many such abandoned games are eventually taken offline, some of them
prevail and they remain, reduced to a sort of digital ghost-town never to be
visited by anyone but a handful of online "adventurers" looking to
explore MMO history in a hands-on manner. YouTuber vinesauce is one of these
adventurers: he shoots videos of himself exploring various off-the-beaten-path
titles, and people obviously like his work. It's quirky and in the same time
interesting, shining the limelight on a lesser-known aspect of the gaming
industry/world.A few days ago, vinesauce
logged on to Active World, a sort of Second Life-like game which saw its heyday
back in 1995 and which is quite barren and abandoned these days. It is indeed a
small miracle that with no players and no interest, it is still online. What he
found in the game wasn't surprising at all. Dated graphics and no activity,
aside from a peculiar character called "Hitomi Fujiko" whom he
assumed to be a NPC at first. As he tried to converse with this "NPC"
though, he began suspecting that there may be a real person behind it. It
wasn't long before things took a turn for the creepy. Hitomi Fujiko began
acting like a lost digital soul of sorts, looking for validation from
vinesauce, he then started threatening so by
that point it was obvious the YouTuber was dealing with some kind of
intelligence.

Some 6,000 people witnessed the
encounter through a stream the YouTuber was hosting and many of them have
indeed confirmed that the chilling encounter had indeed been real and not staged. That however
still leaves lots of room to skepticism: exactly what are the odds that a
popular YouTuber meets a character like that when logging into a long-forgotten
and abandoned game-world? Some of the people following the stream tried to
create accounts and to log in too, but the servers couldn't handle the sudden
attention and account-creation crashed. Still, someone could've logged in
before the stream even started...the likelihood of having such an encounter on
one's first sign-in into a game like Active World is quite minuscule indeed.
The odds say that it was all staged, and we're quite certain we'll gain
confirmation of that in the future.

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